Elites to Race ElliptiGO Miles on Track on Sunday

Re:Run meet also features good running races.

The ElliptiGO is an outdoor elliptical bicycle that allows athletes who are cross-training or nursing an injury to approximate the stride and action of running with almost no pounding. A few ElliptiGO road competitions have been held, including one last fall that included Olympians Adam Goucher (left) and Mary Decker Slaney. Until now, there have been no top-level races on an all-weather 400-meter track.

That changes on Sunday at Balboa Stadium in San Diego at a new combination track meet and road race called Re:Run. The track meet will feature high-quality middle-distance runners like Duane Solomon, Brenda Martinez, Lopez Lomong and Mary Cain, and the 5-K is an event for the general public. What distinguishes Re:Run is its ElliptiGO Miles, track races for which new “world records” will be set, and $1,000 winners’ prizes will be awarded.

The ElliptiGO Miles will be two-person match races. The male rivals are Rusty Snow, who was the 2012 ElliptiGO world champion on an 11.69-mile uphill course, and Craig Leon, who was tenth in the Boston Marathon last month. The women’s race pits Betsy Graney, a steeplechaser who was the 2012 NCAA Division II Women’s Track Athlete of the Year, and 2008 U.S. Olympic marathoner Madgalena Lewy Boulet.

To Lewy Boulet, the ElliptiGO is “as close as you can get to running” other than running. “It’s lower impact, obviously, than running,” and in using it for cross-training, “you can go outside and not be looking at walls.” She began using the device when she has suffered a plantar fascia tear in 2012.

Lewy Boulet was coming from the Bay Area down to San Diego for Re:Run anyway. She coaches Chelsea Reilly, who will be running the “regular” mile, and “this opportunity came up and I thought it would be a lot of fun,” she says.

The ElliptiGo races will in effect be a time trial, Lewy Boulet explains. “You start at two opposite ends of the track [200 meters apart]. You’re constantly chasing someone or running away from someone, being chased.”

She had done long sessions in which she might run for a half hour, do the ElliptoGO for a half hour, and then repeat that sequence, but Lewy Boulet only recently took the ElliptiGO on the track. “I cranked out some 400s and 200s. I just went by hard effort, on and off,” she reports.

She didn’t time herself, but in her ElliptiGO Mile, “it would be awesome if I went sub-4:00.” Lewy Boulet, the wife of former elite miler Richie Boulet, says, “the fun thing would be to break my husband’s mile time, 3:53. If I come in in 3:52, I’ll be stoked.”

Re:Run has just four elite track events, but outside of the USA Track & Field Championships, this is one of the premier middle-distance showcases of the American outdoor track season.

According to organizers, Re:Run is the first professional track meet at Balboa Stadium since 1988, when Steve Scott’s 3:56.06 was the last sub-4:00 mile run in the stadium. It was the site of Jim Ryun’s world record 3:55.3 in 1965, and it’s where Tim Danielson became the second U.S. high school sub-4:00 miler in 1966.